KABUL (Reuters) – The international community in Afghanistan, recently hit by two high-profile attacks on aid organizations, should brace itself for more Taliban violence in the coming months, the deputy commander of foreign forces said.

“I think we should expect (the Taliban) to attack international forces and internationals more generally,” Lt General Nick Carter, Britain’s top soldier in Afghanistan, said in an interview late on Friday, referring to the summer months.

Combat troops from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of next year, ending a costly and increasingly unpopular war launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. targets.

“There’s definitely a sense that the Taliban would like to appear to compel the international community’s withdrawal, and certainly ISAF’s withdrawal,” said Carter, who leaves Afghanistan next month to become head of the British Army.

“That chimes with an obvious narrative.”

British troops in the first Anglo-Afghan war, in 1842, were slaughtered en masse as they withdrew in what is Britain’s biggest military defeat in history.

Afghanistan has been beset by violence in recent weeks.

A coordinated attack on the International Organisation of Migration in Kabul killed at least three civilians and injured four foreign aid workers. The Red Cross headquarters in the eastern city of Jalalabad also came under attack, the first such incident in the 26 years it has worked in the country.

Several foreign organizations in the capital have received more targeted threats than usual over the past week, senior officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Violence aimed at non-military foreign organizations, especially those which help Afghans, came as a surprise to the international community.

The Taliban made no mention of such targets in its annual spring offensive announcement, vowing only to start a campaign of suicide attacks on military bases and diplomatic areas.

Insurgents this week besieged Kabul’s main airport for four hours before being killed, and a Taliban suicide bomber detonated explosives in front of the Supreme Court, killing at least 17 people.

Plans are still on track to hand over the remaining security responsibilities to the Afghan security forces “within the next week or so”, Carter said.

Afghan security forces lead in 89 percent of operations, with foreign forces still in combat along much of the border with Pakistan and in pockets around the country, including Helmand province, a bastion of the Taliban.

Once troops withdraw, NATO’s role will move to a support mission to strengthen the 352,000-strong Afghan security forces.

Carter stressed that developing Afghanistan’s fledgling air force in the years following the withdrawal was crucial.

“Horizons have to be tangible and I think it’s very reasonable to talk about the Afghan air force being fielded by 2018 or 2019,” he said.

MUSHAF AIR BASE, Pakistan (Reuters) – With an olive green head scarf poking out from her helmet, Ayesha Farooq flashes a cheeky grin when asked if it is lonely being the only war-ready female fighter pilot in the Islamic republic of Pakistan.

Farooq, from Punjab province’s historic city of Bahawalpur, is one of 19 women who have become pilots in the Pakistan Air Force over the last decade – there are five other female fighter pilots, but they have yet to take the final tests to qualify for combat.

“I don’t feel any different. We do the same activities, the same precision bombing,” the soft-spoken 26-year-old said of her male colleagues at Mushaf base in north Pakistan, where neatly piled warheads sit in sweltering 50 degree Celsius heat (122 F).

A growing number of women have joined Pakistan’s defense forces in recent years as attitudes towards women change.

“Because of terrorism and our geographical location it’s very important that we stay on our toes,” said Farooq, referring to Taliban militancy and a sharp rise in sectarian violence.

Deteriorating security in neighboring Afghanistan, where U.S.-led troops are preparing to leave by the end of next year, and an uneasy relationship with arch rival India to the east add to the mix.

Farooq, whose slim frame offers a study in contrast with her burly male colleagues, was at loggerheads with her widowed and uneducated mother seven years ago when she said she wanted to join the air force.

“In our society most girls don’t even think about doing such things as flying an aircraft,” she said.

Family pressure against the traditionally male domain of the armed forces dissuaded other women from taking the next step to become combat ready, air force officials said. They fly slower aircraft instead, ferrying troops and equipment around the nuclear-armed country of 180 million.

“LESS OF A TABOO”

Centuries-old rule in the tribal belt area along the border with Afghanistan, where rape, mutilation and the killing of women are ordered to mete out justice, underlines conservative Pakistan’s failures in protecting women’s rights.

But women are becoming more aware of those rights and signing up with the air force is about as empowering as it gets.

“More and more ladies are joining now,” said Nasim Abbas, Wing Commander of Squadron 20, made up of 25 pilots, including Farooq, who fly Chinese-made F-7PG fighter jets.

“It’s seen as less of a taboo. There’s been a shift in the nation’s, the society’s, way of thinking,” Abbas told Reuters on the base in Punjab’s Sargodha district, about 280 km (175 miles) east of the capital Islamabad, home base to many jets in the 1965 and 1971 wars with India.

There are now about 4,000 women in Pakistan’s armed forces, largely confined to desk jobs and medical work.

But over the last decade, women have became sky marshals, defending Pakistan’s commercial liners against insurgent attacks, and a select few are serving in the elite anti-terrorist force. Like most female soldiers in the world, Pakistani women are still banned from ground combat.

Pakistan now has 316 women in the air force compared to around 100 five years ago, Abbas said.

“In Pakistan, it’s very important to defend our front lines because of terrorism and it’s very important for everyone to be part of it,” said avionics engineer Anam Hassan, 24, as she set out for work on an F-16 fighter aircraft, her thick black hair tucked under a baseball cap.

The growing use of the drug, known as crystal meth or ice, comes at a critical time. Some fear that, with the exit of most foreign troops by the end of next year and dwindling interest and aid from the international community, significant addiction to the relatively new drug could wreak social havoc.

The number of crystal meth samples taken from seizures tripled to 48 in 2012 compared with the year before, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Importantly, however, there are concerns the power vacuum left by the withdrawal of foreign troops could turn Afghanistan into a new route for moving Iranian-made crystal meth to nations in the Pacific, like Thailand and Indonesia, through Pakistan.

“It’s a potential threat,” a Kabul-based official from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Small quantities of around half a kilogram are usually seized, said Peter Bottomley, the UNODC’s consultant in Kabul, describing it as a “worrying trend”.

“If this country gets addicted to meth, there will be a big problem,” Bottomley said.

Afghanistan is the world’s top producer of opium, from which heroin is made and which helps fund the Taliban’s insurgency, and is heading for a near-record this year, the UNODC has said.

Treatment options for Afghanistan’s 1 million heroin addicts, some of whom inject into their groins in broad daylight in central Kabul, are sorely limited.

In the country’s sole, ultra-secretive drugs lab on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghan pharmacists analyze samples from seizures brought in on a daily basis, which are subject to three rounds of testing to identify the substance and its potency.

A sack of translucent crystals resembling large grains of sea salt sat on one of the lab’s tables – one of the recent seizures of crystal meth. It stood out starkly among the brown hues of heroin, opium, morphine and hashish in tiny bags.

“If only we could get the punishment increased for selling this,” said Mohammad Khalid Nabizada, the head of the lab, which operates under the Interior Ministry’s Counter Narcotics Police.

Prison terms for selling crystal meth are relatively light, with dealers facing up to one year behind bars for 1 kg (2.2 lb), compared with up to three years for opium and a maximum of 10 years for the same amount of heroin.

“ABNORMAL BEHAVIOUR”

Dubbed “glass” in Afghanistan, crystal meth only appeared in recent years and is made in high-tech labs across the border in Iran. Most of it is consumed in the border provinces of Herat and Nimroz, but seizures have been scattered across the country.

Its street price is about $20, or five times that of heroin, making it relatively expensive in one of the world’s poorest countries, said Ahmad Khalid Mowahid, spokesman for the Criminal Justice Task Force that convicts serious drug offenders.

KABUL (Reuters) – Taliban militants launched a large-scale attack involving the United Nations in the center of the Afghan capital Kabul on Friday, sparking a five-hour battle with security forces.

A plume of smoke hung over Kabul after the attack was launched, with the sound of .50 caliber heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and sniper fire clearly audible throughout the city center as night fell.

An Afghan police officer was killed and 10 other people were wounded during the attack, which began at 4 p.m. (1130 GMT) with a suicide car bomb outside a compound used by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Afghan police said.

While the IOM is not part of the United Nations, it is affiliated with it in Afghanistan.

The attack came eight days after six American soldiers and civilians and nine Afghans were killed in a suicide car bombing in Kabul.

The Taliban, fighting to expel Western forces and establish Islamist rule in Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, saying a “rest house” used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been attacked.

After the initial bombing, about six Taliban fighters engaged in a firefight with nearby guards, officials said.

Two were killed and the remaining three or four militants entered an unused building across the road from the IOM compound and continued to fight.

There were at least four large blasts during the course of the evening, and witnesses said that at 9 p.m. (1630 GMT) exchanges of fire were still going on between the attackers and Afghan forces supported by Norwegian special forces.

“As a result of the attack, three IOM staff and one International Labour Organisation (ILO) staff were wounded,” U.N. spokesman Eduardo del Buey told reporters in New York.

He said one of the IOM personnel was in serious condition, and that all U.N. staff in Kabul had been accounted for.

The ILO is a subsidiary of the United Nations and operates in Kabul under the banner of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

Such attacks reinforce concern about how the 352,000 members of the Afghan security forces will cope with the insurgency after most foreign NATO-led combat troops leave by the end of next year.

Insurgent attacks against civilians, government workers and Afghan security forces have increased since the Taliban announced their so-called spring offensive late last month.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, speaking to Reuters by telephone, said Friday’s attack had targeted a compound used by the CIA.

It is likely that the Taliban, driven from power in Kabul by a U.S-led force in late 2001, are using the high-profile attacks to exert increasing pressure on the Afghan government and their international backers.

Last year, more than a dozen people were killed during a Taliban attack in Kabul that started with coordinated suicide attacks and led to an 18-hour siege in the heart of the city.

(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in New York; Writing by Dylan Welch; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

He said the fighters were targeting a compound used “mostly by members of the CIA”, adding that they had gained access to the compound after the first bomb.

The Taliban routinely overstate the results of their attacks.

Shooting erupted after the first bomb, with more blasts beginning about 30 minutes later.

Insurgent attacks against civilians, government workers and Afghan security forces have increased in recent weeks as the Taliban, toppled by a U.S-led force in 2001, exert increasing pressure on the Afghan government.

Fifteen people, including six Americans, were killed on May 16 in a suicide bombing by the Hezb-i Islami insurgent group, which is allied with the Taliban.

Last year, more than a dozen people were killed during a Taliban attack in Kabul which started with coordinated suicide attacks and led to an 18-hour long siege.

He said the fighters were targeting a compound used “mostly by members of the CIA”, adding that they had gained access to the compound after the first bomb.

The Taliban routinely overstate the results of their attacks.

Shooting erupted after the first bomb, with more blasts beginning about 30 minutes later.

Insurgent attacks against civilians, government workers and Afghan security forces have increased in recent weeks as the Taliban, toppled by a U.S-led force in 2001, exert increasing pressure on the Afghan government.

Fifteen people, including six Americans, were killed on May 16 in a suicide bombing by the Hezb-i Islami insurgent group, which is allied with the Taliban.

Last year, more than a dozen people were killed during a Taliban attack in Kabul which started with coordinated suicide attacks and led to an 18-hour long siege.

KABUL (Reuters) – About 600 Afghan women and girls are behind bars for so-called moral crimes, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday, the highest number since the Taliban were toppled almost twelve years ago.

Running away from home, usually from abuse and forced marriage, and alleged adultery, which often involves rape, have landed most of the 600 women in prison. That figure is an increase of 50 percent over the last 18 months.

“That increase reflects a shameful lack and failure of political will by both the government of Afghanistan and its foreign donors and allies,” Phelim Kine, HRW’s deputy director of Asia, told reporters.

Women have won back rights of education and work since the Taliban were toppled by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, but there are fears these freedoms could be curtailed after most NATO-led forces leave by the end of next year.

The New York-based rights group said the statistics on girls and women in prison came from the Interior Ministry.

The findings come days after parliament failed to ratify an Elimination of Violence Against Women law, which would have strengthened a 2009 presidential decree banning forced and underage marriage, beatings and rape.

Conservative religious lawmakers blocked the decree’s ratification, arguing some articles were un-Islamic, such as keeping the legal age for women to marry at 16 and maintaining the existence of shelters for domestic abuse victims.

“If the parliament were to in future reverse this law, that would have very, very serious consequences for Afghanistan,” said HRW Afghanistan researcher Heather Barr. On Monday, the United Nations urged the government to ratify the law.

Barr said if the abuse of girls and women continued, countries that help Afghanistan might not be willing to.

“International donors will not support a country where girls who are 9 or 10 years old can be married,” she said.

While HRW said it was difficult to pinpoint the reason for the increase in the imprisonment of women for “moral crimes”, Barr said incarceration of both men and women had risen across the country in recent years.

The pending withdrawal of foreign troops and dwindling global interest in Afghanistan may also play a role.

“As everyone anticipates the departure of foreigners, there is a feeling that, in a sense, things can go back to normal,” she said.

HERAT, Afghanistan, May 20 (Reuters) – The European Union
threw its weight behind developing Afghanistan’s small but
promising private sector this week, in the hope that business
can usher in stability and peace once foreign troops leave by
the end of next year.

In the largest ever EU visit outside the capital Kabul in 12
years of war, a 21-country delegation of envoys jetted to the
western city of Herat on Sunday, whose flurry of business
activity is largely seen as a rare success story in desperately
poor, insurgency-plagued Afghanistan.

War and tens of billions of dollars in constant aid have
made Afghanistan a ward of the international community, though
vast potential mineral resources and pent-up business desire
amongst educated youths mean the environment could be changing.

The EU chose Herat for its trip as “we are encouraged by the
province’s vision, its ability to attract foreign investment”,
the bloc’s representative to Afghanistan, Vygaudas Usackas, told
Herat governor Daoud Saba at his summer home overlooking the
city, where high-rise apartments glistened in the sun.

Saba, appointed three years ago largely for his expertise in
minerals, called his large and fertile province, one of 34 in
the country, a “stand-alone island”.

Herat’s $1-billion a year economy, mostly from agriculture,
industry and mining, led the province to contribute almost a
fifth of the country’s revenue last year.

“Afghanistan is slowly, slowly becoming another country,
moving from the Kabul-centric way of things,” Italian ambassador
Luciano Pezzotti, whose embassy and military organised the EU
trip to Herat, told Reuters.

The fourth-largest contributor to the NATO-led war, almost
all of Italy’s 3,000 troops are in Herat.

German ambassador Rudiger Koenig said Herat, which enjoys
better security than the Taliban strongholds of the south and
east, should serve as a “blueprint” for the rest of the country.

Despite Western sanctions denting the economy of much richer
Iran, with which Afghanistan shares a long and porous border,
Herat enjoys robust trade with its Muslim neighbour and is
expected to more than double its output over the next decade,
spurred by the private sector, Saba said.

In 2012, 8.4 percent of Afghanistan’s annual GDP of around
$20 billion was from the private sector, according to the Asian
Development Bank, up 1 percent on the year before.

KABUL (Reuters) – Russia, predicting instability once NATO-led troops withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next year, is considering deploying border guards on the Tajik-Afghan border, Moscow’s envoy to Kabul told Reuters in an interview.

Moscow, still sore from its disastrous, decade-long war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, is increasingly concerned by what it describes as the combined threat of narcotics and terrorism reaching Russia through former Soviet Central Asian countries.

“We prefer to tackle this problem on the Afghan border to stop these threats,” Andrey Avetisyan said late on Thursday in the Russian embassy in Kabul.

Its sprawling grounds host a Soviet-built teal Volga car recovered in Afghanistan by embassy staff and a memorial to the 15,000 Soviet lives lost in the war against mujahideen fighters.

“We used to have a serious presence on the Afghan-Tajik border and, at that time, the situation there was much better, so it would be in the interest of both Russia and Tajikistan and even Afghanistan if Russia is present there,” he said.

Avetisyan said such a presence would involve Russian border troops, but declined to give a number.

Russian border guards used to patrol the Tajik frontier with Afghanistan but left in 2005, ending a Soviet-era legacy and handing all power over to local authorities. Ex-Soviet Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan also border Afghanistan to its north.

Avetisyan said any agreement on border troop deployment would “of course” have to be agreed upon with Tajikistan.

Intensifying violence across Afghanistan, less than two years before foreign combat troops withdraw, has sent tremors of worry across Russia, which is battling an Islamist insurgency in its North Caucasus as well as widespread use of heroin and a huge increase in the incidence of HIV and AIDS.

Russia is involved in a series of ambitious construction projects in Afghanistan, including rebuilding its Soviet-era cultural centre [ID:nL3E8MB2NJ], aimed at fostering stability in the country which produces 90 percent of the world’s opium.

Avetisyan, who also worked for the Soviet government in Kabul during Moscow’s war, said fighting in northern Afghanistan — traditional bastions of anti-Taliban power groups — offers proof of a “general destabilization of the situation”.

COMPARISONS WITH SOVIET CAMPAIGN

Comparisons are being increasingly drawn between the Soviet and NATO-led wars, and the Taliban have repeatedly warned Washington that it will encounter the same fate met by Moscow.

After the dispirited Soviet exit in 1989, the Afghan communist government collapsed, leading to infighting between warlords and a civil war that reduced much of Kabul to rubble and paved the way for the Taliban’s rise to power in 1996.

“What have they been doing for the past 12 years?” Avetisyan asked of the current campaign, America’s longest war.

“Fighting against terrorism with 150,000 troops without any success,” he said, adding that a continued troop presence after 2014 “doesn’t make any sense”.

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to soon announce how many combat troops Washington will leave after the withdrawal. Many Afghans are eager to know the size of the post-2014 force, fearing chaos and civil war could erupt with no foreign presence.

The United States is widely expected to retain nine bases across Afghanistan after 2014, NATO officials said after Afghan President Hamid Karzai revealed the plan this month.

But Avetisyan said any future U.S. military role in the country must be an international legal arrangement approved by the United Nations Security Council, in which Russia has veto power.

“A long-term or permanent military presence of a foreign force will be a reason of concern for us, especially if they are military bases. We would like to know what the purpose is and we still don’t have answers to these questions,” he said.

KABUL (Reuters) – U.S. forces in Afghanistan are hoping that a small steel industry can be born from the mammoth task of withdrawing equipment by the end of next year, jump-starting a scrap trade and injecting cash into local businesses.

It will cost the United States almost $6 billion to remove the enormous amount of materiel scattered in hundreds of bases across Afghanistan from the longest war in U.S. history.

Most will be returned to the United States by land, air and sea routes, namely via Pakistan’s Karachi port, but some of the equipment will stay on after the Dec 31, 2014 deadline for the exit of most combat troops.

U.S.-made scrap from the war could be worth over $80 million on the international market, according to Reuters calculations.

“Scrap is a big deal,” said U.S. Brigadier-General Steven Shapiro, deputy of 1st Theater Sustainment Command, which oversees the “retrograde” or the removal of equipment.

“Ultimately the military can only do so much, the diplomats can only do so much, ultimately you want to generate economics,” Shapiro told Reuters in an interview this week.

His unit organized what he amusingly dubbed a “scrap shura” last month south of the capital Kabul where businessmen were invited to learn about steel and scrap.

“Now they’re coming in and bidding on the tonnage,” Shapiro said of the tens of thousands of empty shipping containers and old models of Humvees and MRAP armored vehicles, which cost half a million dollars each to make, and which will be scrapped.

Proceeds from sales are returned to the U.S. treasury by the Defence Logistics Agency in Virginia.

U.S. scrap could breathe life into Afghanistan’s fledgling steel industry, which only has five working mills, according to government-run Afghanistan Investment Support Agency.

Twelve years of the NATO-led war and billions of dollars in steady aid means Afghanistan is riding on a construction boom, but it must rely on steel imports from Pakistan and Russia in an increasingly expensive market.

For steel mill chief executive Parwiz Khojazada, the prospect of buying U.S.-made steel is a godsend.

Rusty, Soviet-built tanks dot the dirt road to his Maisam Factory on the outskirts of Kabul, a stark reminder of the humiliating end met by Moscow more than 20 years ago.

In an updated version of swords being beaten into ploughshares, Khojazada said his company smelts the tanks into steel bars, and is now eager to do the same with U.S. equipment.

“I don’t pay much attention to the fact war brought it here, I just care about the quality,” Khojazada said of U.S. scrap, perched in his office overlooking his sprawling plant, where black-faced workers were gathering steel bars.

He knows first-hand how good American steel can be: 10 percent of Maisam’s 1,000 metric tons (1,102 tons)of finished products per month are made from U.S. war equipment scrap.